University of Virginia Library

X.

To die—to feel the spirit fainting
In the mansions of the breast,
While yet the vivid eye is painting
Life and vigor unpossessed;
To see the mortal frame decaying,
The temple's pillars breaking down,
And know the soul will soon be straying
Over climes and realms unknown;
While warm affection hovers o'er
The couch of death, with wailing prayer
Imploring lengthened life once more
In all the anguish of despair;
And we behold and feel and know
All that is felt for us and yet
Beside perceive the overthrow
Of hopes on which the heart is set,
And picture in our dying hour
Anguish unknown till we are dead,
And conscious, hopeless misery's power,
And tears from being's fountains shed—
Oh, 'tis a time, an hour of gloom
Worse than the midnight of the tomb!
But, ah, 'tis worse to think that we,
The proud, high, sentient lords of earth
Must moulder into dust and be
Or clay or nothing! At our birth
It was decreed that we should die,
But not that we should rotting lie
With every foul and loathsome thing
Blending our ashes.—Fling, oh, fling
My corse in ocean's booming wave,
Or burn it on the funeral pyre,
But lay it not in reeking grave
To glimmer with corruption's fire!
St. Clara's funeral bell is knelling
With the solemn voice of death,
And far the mournful notes are swelling
While from postern far beneath
Issue the white-robed virgin train,
Chanting low the requiem strain,
Over the dark and dismal tomb
Of one in being's roseate bloom,
And one in sallow withered age,
Departed from life's tragic stage.
Where sorrow never wakes to weep,
And ill and wrong distract no more,
And homeless wanderers sweetly sleep,
And hate and pride and pain are o'er,
They lay the vestals finally.
Above them waves a cypress tree,
Intwined with briar and rosemary,
And round them sleep the mighty dead,
Who centuries since forever fled;
A silent nation gone—alas!
Where living thought can never pass.
The ceremonial pomp is past—
The vestals vanish, one by one—
The holy father is the last,
And even he hath slowly gone.
And stillness reigns o'er all the scene,
That is so peaceful and serene;
A stillness greatly eloquent
When pious spirits bow and feel
Delicious melancholy, sent
From heaven o'er all their being steal
With purifying breathings mild;
And they become like little child
Gentle and docile, purely good,
In their communing solitude,
And look from earth to heaven with eye
Of sage reflecting piety,
Comparing man's allotment here
With glories of a brighter sphere.